local shiny app crashes after temporary directory gets deleted

Question

I'm running a shiny app locally on my Windows machine that auto-runs every day using a batch file. I recently ran into an issue lately where the R tmp directory /tmp/RtmpXXXXX is removed and the application fails:

Warning in file(open = "w+b", encoding = "UTF-8") :
  cannot open file 
'C:\Users\Carlos\AppData\Local\Temp\Rtmp0maCtT\Rf140c40ab30be': No such file 
or directory  # deleted file
Warning in normalizePath(path.expand(path), winslash, mustWork) :
  path[1]="C:\Users\Carlos\AppData\Local\Temp\Rtmp0maCtT": The system cannot 
find the file specified  # deleted folder
Warning in file(open = "w+") :
  cannot open file 
'C:\Users\Carlos\AppData\Local\Temp\Rtmp0maCtT\Rf140c38044f8': No such file 
or directory
Warning: Error in file: cannot open the connection  # program crashes
Stack trace (innermost first):
    1: runApp
Error : cannot open the connection

How should I manage a temporary directory that automatically gets deleted after a certain amount of time? I tried changing the file path to see if that would resolve the issue, but that didn't work.

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 07 '18 at 18:42

I ran procmon and noticed that Windows Disk Cleanup was removing temporary files automatically almost every day, affecting the session's temporary directory and causing the shiny app to crash.

To disable this automatically scheduled task :

Open Task Scheduler
Drill down to Task Scheduler Library > Microsoft > Windows
Click on DiskCleanup
In the right-hand pane click Disable

local shiny app crashes after temporary directory gets deleted

1 Answers1